I recently came into possession of an
Ozone Strike Pro gaming keyboard, it's not a keyboard I would normally consider but they asked for an unbiased review and that's what they've got.
Packaging is nice, in line with modern gaming keyboards but with much less waste material (which is good!). I'm fed up of those majestic packaging full of useless stuff inside (yeah I'm looking at you CM Novatouch and you any-product-by-Razer).
The keyboard itself is very solid and heavy (approx 1.3kg - 2.8lbs), it is available only in full layout, no TKL. The version that I'm reviewing is ANSI with Cherry MX Red, but the "usual-four" are available. No fancy cherry green/white/gray are contemplated.
The keyboard has a very sober design for being marketed as "gaming", the branding is prominent but not disturbing. It has an integrated palm rest that cannot be removed. It is very well done, but I feel it's a little too short to be really comfortable. Maybe a removable one would have been better, so one could use a custom palm rest or save some desktop space.
The font for the legends is the usual spaceship-gamer-crash-boom-bang typeface. I must say it's not the worst I've seen, it actually has some "character" but it has some disturbing inconsistencies here and there.
Most letters are uppercase, but N and M are lowercase because the designer thought it was cool. ^, *, - and others are too small. %, &, @, $ too big. _ (underscore) wrongly aligned. The enter symbol is aligned to the absolute center instead of the "visual center". Also, I'm not a fan of the symbol they chose for the arrows, but that might be just me.
The overall impact is not bad anyway and pretty elegant for being a gamer board.
The chassis is (god-forbid) rubber coated. I don't know why they put rubber on gamers' boards. Anyway the coating is very well done, fine and hard to scratch, totally unneeded, grease and dust magnet, but very nice to look at and touch.
The cable is braided and drives both USB and mic/headphones connections. On the back of the keyboard you'll find one USB pass-through port and the mic/headphones inputs, quite handy actually. The connectors are gold-color but I don't think they are actually gold plated. Very annoyingly the mic/headphone logos on the back are impossible to read, so you'll need some tries to find the right input.
The cable can be smartly routed to the right, left or center thanks to some small cavities on the bottom of the case.
Backlight is white for most of the keys except for the arrow and WASD clusters and ESC key. Backlight intesity can be regulated with a dedicated key (FN+Scroll lock) but unfortunately only the white LEDs lower in intensity, the red ones are fixed and tend to burn your retina.
Dual LEDs on the WASD and arrows would have been desirable, as it is now I find the red lasers quite distracting, especially since you can't lower their intensity.
Keycaps are standard. Pretty thin. The coating is smooth and the lasered legends razor sharp. The standard backlight compatible keycaps you find everywhere. No additional keycap is included in the box.
Once connected
the typing experience is very good actually. No reverb whatsoever. Keypresses are sharp and the sound is the best a cherry MX red can offer. The costar (YAY!) stabilizers are firm and don't rattle.
The Strike Pro is advertised as 1000hz polling rate, 1ms response. Apart from the fact that I doubt 1ms (debounce+latency) is even possible, there's something I don't completely understand.
It is possible to change both the polling rate and the response time from the dedicated keys. I thought the two were strictly connected. You can get 1ms responce only at 1000hz. Even though you can slow down the response time idling for one or more cycles, I don't really see why you would want to do that. It's not like with mice where sensor sensitivity is very important (and subjective).
Also how the hell are you supposed to get 1ms response time at 125hz? Maybe the response time is in "cycles" and not in milliseconds. Or maybe faster-than-polling-time response times are simply ignored (eg: the minimum for 125hz polling will always be 8ms). I tried to contact Ozone about this but got no answer.
Maybe this is a "gamer thing" and I'm missing something extremely obvious, so I candidly confess my ignorance and leave this alone.
The keyboard comes with a massive 64K memory. You can not only create 6 macros (with pause between keys if needed) but you can change the behavior of each and every key!
If you want you can reprogram the whole matrix and the result can be stored into the keyboard memory, so you don't actually need any software. I find this a killer feature.
The problem is of course that the software to reprogram the strike pro is windows only, slow and rather tedious to use. But once you've found your perfect config you won't be using it anymore.
The strike pro also features very handy multimedia keys on the FN layer (under the function keys).
Of course I opened the keyboard. The PCB traces and components are very tidy and well soldered, but
I've never seen a PCB as dirty as the Strike Pro's. It doesn't affect in any way the keyboard performance, but still tells us that Ozone spared as much as they could in the manufacturing lane (I guess it's soldering paste residue, you can clearly see it in the pic below).
[size=150]Conclusions[/size]The Strike Pro is a nice looking full size, backlit keyboard. Top notch performance and nice features (like the 64k integrated memory), but there's very little remarkable about it. No big defects, no huge merits. Overall good, but nothing that makes me want to buy it over a competitor.
So my suggestion is, if you find it at a very good price or maybe second-hand, go for it, it's a good investment. Otherwise...
